Updated ATI Driver, Now Game Crashes When Opening Contact Window

I have a Radeon 5770 graphics card, CoH told me to update the drivers, and when I did the game started looking great, smoother, I could finally use FSAA...but...

On certain characters if I open the Contact window, the game will totally lock up, and after a few seconds, fade to gray, and Windows will tell me it crashed, and my display driver stopped working. If I try to load those characters up again, the contact window is already open, and I will crash before I am even able to fully load in.

This has been going on for a few days, at first if I rebooted the PC it would clear the issue, and the problem would stay gone for the rest of my gaming session, but if I waited a few hours and started to play again, same problem. Now, rebooting does not help. I have to log in on my laptop, close the contact window, and then I can play the character once more.

I am really hoping I am doing something wrong here, so I am hoping to get some advice on this. If it helps, I used CoH Helper, and these are my results:

---System information gathered by CoH Helper version 0.2.0.2---

DxDiag gathered at December 16, 2010 12:16 (-06:00)
Operating System: Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit (6.1, Build 7600) (7600.win7_gdr.100618-1621)
System Manufacturer: Acer
System Model: Aspire M3300
BIOS: Default System BIOS
Central Processor: AMD Phenom(tm) II X4 810 Processor (4 CPUs), ~2.6GHz
Memory: 6144MB
.Net Memory Report: 4322MB out of 5886MB available
Page File: 9894MB (1876MB currently in use)
C Drive: (WDC WD10 EADS-22M2B0 SATA Disk Device) 340542MB out of 937382MB (36%) free
D Drive: (HL-DT-ST DVDRAM GH41N SATA CdRom Device) zero-size drive
Windows directory location: C:\Windows
DirectX: DirectX 11
DirectX Diag version: 6.01.7600.16385 (64-bit version)

Display Notes: No problems found.
Sound Notes: No problems found.

No problems found.

No problems found.
Input Notes: No problems found.

Monitor:
Monitor's Max Resolution: (blank)
Video Device Name: ATI Radeon HD 5700 Series
Manufacturer / Chip: ATI Technologies Inc. / ATI display adapter (0x68B8)
Video Memory: 3699 MB
Driver Version: 8.801.0.0
Driver Date: 11/25/2010 8:57:08 PM
Driver Language: English

Sound Device Description: Speakers (Realtek High Definition Audio)
Driver File: RTKVHD64.sys
Driver Version: 6.00.0001.5942
Driver Date: 9/21/2009 3:58:22 AM

Sound Device Description: Realtek HDMI Output (Realtek High Definition Audio)
Driver File: RTKVHD64.sys
Driver Version: 6.00.0001.5942
Driver Date: 9/21/2009 3:58:22 AM

Sound Device Description: Realtek Digital Output (Realtek High Definition Audio)
Driver File: RTKVHD64.sys
Driver Version: 6.00.0001.5942
Driver Date: 9/21/2009 3:58:22 AM


WMI Information
Motherboard Manufacturer: Acer
Motherboard Model: (empty)
Motherboard Product: FRS780M
Motherboard Version:
BIOS Manufacturer: American Megatrends Inc.
BIOS Name: Default System BIOS
BIOS Version: ACRSYS - 20091116
BIOS Release: 20091116000000.000000+000


Registry Information for Current User
Resolution: 1280x1024
3D Resolution: 1280x1024 (Not using renderscale)
Full Screen: Yes
Maximized: No
Screen Position: 0, 0
Refresh Rate: 60Hz
Vertical Sync Enabled: Yes


Physics Quality: High
Maximum Particles: 50000
Max Particle Fill? 10.000
Physics Card Enabled: No


Anti-aliasing: 8x
Anisotropic Filtering: 4x
Texture LOD Bias: Smooth
Water Effects: Ultra quality
Bloom: 2.000 (turned off)
Depth of Field Enabled: Yes
Desaturation Effects (Sepia) Enabled: Yes
Shader Detail: High


World Texture Level: Very High
Character Texture Level: Very High
World Detail Level (Vis_Scale): 2.000
Entity Detail Level: 2.000
Shadows Enabled: No
Shadow Mode: Unknown (5)
Shadow Map Shader: High quality
Environmental Reflections: Ultra quality
Advanced Occlusion Settings: No
Ambient Occlusion: Ultra
Occlusion Strength: Strong with color bleeding
Blur: Trilateral
Ambient Resolution: Quality


Gamma Correction: 1.000
Geometry Buffers (VBOs) Enabled: Yes
Suppression of FX When Camera Close Enabled: No
Close Suppression Range: 3.000
Show Advertisements: Yes

Audio Mode: Performance
3D Audio: No
FX Sound Volume: 0.017
Music Sound Volume: 0.000

Show Advanced Graphics Options: Yes
Overall Graphics Quality: 0.500
Reverse Mouse Buttons: No
Save Login Username: Yes
Transfer Rate: 1636812 bytes/second
Current Game Version: 1900.201011102104.24
Installation Directory: C:\Program Files (x86)\City of Heroes

Mod files in the Data directory
.\texts\English\Menus has 5 files
.\texture_library\MAPS\city has 1 file
.\texture_library\MAPS\Midnight_Squad has 1 file
.\texture_library\MAPS\Safeguard has 9 files
.\texture_library\MAPS\sewers has 44 files
.\texture_library\MAPS\static has 38 files
.\texture_library\V_MAPS\City has 1 file
.\texture_library\V_MAPS\Outdoor_Missions has 9 files
.\texture_library\V_MAPS\Static has 16 files




Any help in this would be greatly appreciated!

---

@Incarnadine - 50s on Victory:
Electric-Boogaloo (Electric/Psy Dominator) | Floating Flame (Fire/Psy Blaster) | Guldo Golem (Stone/Mace Tanker) | Hornak (Elec/Elec Brute) | Insatiable Greed (Demon/Dark Mastermind) | Solar Explorer (Plant/Thermal Controller) | TimeTraveler (Kin/Ice Defender) | Verranil (Emp/Archery Defender)

Rollback to 10.9 drivers. It worked for me.

---

Chalk up another comment for using the 10.9 drivers - I know 10.12 has just come out, but 10.9 has proved virtually flawless, even with EVERYTHING cranked up on my 5850.

Michelle
aka
Samuraiko/Dark_Respite

---

Okay, was able to get the 10.9 driver installed and working, first test was successful, though it did seem to hang up when I first opened the contact window, something it had done before when restarting the PC fixed the problem, so I am not 100% sure that this fixed the issue or not, but I will probably know by the end of the day.

If it comes down to it, I still have the install disk that came with the graphics card, so I will try going back to that if I still have the issue.

Thanks for the advice!

---

@Incarnadine - 50s on Victory:
Electric-Boogaloo (Electric/Psy Dominator) | Floating Flame (Fire/Psy Blaster) | Guldo Golem (Stone/Mace Tanker) | Hornak (Elec/Elec Brute) | Insatiable Greed (Demon/Dark Mastermind) | Solar Explorer (Plant/Thermal Controller) | TimeTraveler (Kin/Ice Defender) | Verranil (Emp/Archery Defender)

It may or may not be related, but you should update your sound card drivers as well (the Realtek stuff). I know there are newer drivers than 2009 available, since I just upgraded my own a couple days ago.

It may or may not help, but I'm using all updated drivers (10.12) on my 5850 and having no problems. So it could be worth a shot.

---

I have a ticket open with tech support about this at the moment.

For me the contact that (appears) to be causing the crash is the television BUT only if water quality setting is on.

Try either turning off water reflections or roll back to 10.9.

You can log in with safe mode to close the contacts tab if you are having problems logging onto an affected toon.

---

My LotG sold for 65mil and I'm spending it all on hats

Needlepoint and Hobbytex Champion 1984

Blaming others since 2003

10.10 and 10.11 have been really hard on us ATI folks. 10.9 has been working for most of us. I'm trying out 10.12 and so far no issues.

One other thing people have been finding is that CoH isn't "graphic intensive" enough to trigger GPU fans kicking in. So the cards are running hot and apparently that's been a source of some of the "issues" see Evil Geko. Manual GPU or GPU fan tweaking software would be helpful.

I'm using GPU fan tweaking software now.

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H: Blaster 50, Defender 50, Tank 50, Scrapper 50, Controller 50, PB 50, WS 50
V: Brute 50, Corruptor 50, MM 50, Dominator 50, Stalker 50, AW 50, AS 50
Top 4: Controller, Brute, Scrapper, Corruptor
Bottom 4: (Peacebringer) way below everything else, Mastermind, Dominator, Blaster
CoH in WQHD